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Have you prepared a trick or treat bag big enough for billions of zombies???

Finally, we have activated the supporting web for all those who wish to back the development of They Are Billions. We have prepared six special reward tiers that will be available until the game is finished.

All the contributions will be 100% dedicated to improving the game quality, adding languages, units, zombies, buildings, expanding the game goals and modes and much more!

The Six Editions
Each edition has the name of one of the six main units of the game: Ranger, Soldier, Sniper, Lucifer, Thanatos, and Titan. All of them include a Steam Key to play They Are Billions and four cool 4K wallpapers.

Apart from that, take a look at the extra rewards:

– Soldier Edition: Your name in the Bronze Credits section of the game. The Artbook and Soundtrack. And all future DLC!– Sniper Edition: Soldier rewards and Silver Credits mention. Your name and custom quote in the game loading screen. It will appear randomly, so write something cool and unique for to all the players to see!– Lucifer Edition: Be a colony Mayor! Design a Mayor with your name, slogan and custom features. All the colonies have to choose their Mayor. Will you be their preferred one?– Thanatos Edition: Convert yourself as a Steampunk Soldier, Victorian Colonist or Zombie! Our artist will draw your preferred character with you as a model for an amazing portrait.– Titan Edition: Same as the Thanatos Edition but with a full body drawing!!! Could you be something more awesome? Just look at the current drawing of the units and imagine yourself as one of them! All with a high-quality drawing printable in big poster format!

So here, at the Numantian Games website, you can get them. The payments are managed by the Humble Store. You will receive the Steam Key and wallpapers by email immediately. For the other rewards you will receive additional instructions.

IMPORTANT: It seems the website is having too many connections and it can be down from time to time. Be patient! We are trying to fix it.

The Beta Program
First let us remind you the game schedule:
– Fall 2017: Preview beta access to the Survival mode from our website.
– Spring 2018: Steam Early Access with both improved Survival mode and Campaign.
– Sometime later in 2018: Steam Full Launch.

First step done! The beta access to the Survival Mode is finally here. The Survival Mode is a whole game in itself. It is highly addictive, fast to play, hardcore, and extremely fun – even when losing!

But remember that it is just a beta, and even after hundreds of hours of testing, it can still have unknown bugs, glitches, balancing issues, and lots of things that will be improved on with time. And of course, the game will be expanded with every update.

Surely there will be problems in specific PC configurations, like weird resolutions, multi-monitor setups, GPU drivers… It is just normal and part of the beta/testing phase. We will work hard to solve every problem with you, but please be patient, especially in the beginning as we could get overwhelmed with a lot of feedback.

Gameplay Video!
Not available yet! We will update this section as soon as it is published! Apologies!

THANKS!From Numantian Games we would like to give you a BIG THANKS for all of your support. We really hope you enjoy the game. We are eager to listen to your thoughts and feedback!

We have created a new subforum branch for the game owners. There you can post all topics related to the beta. Please share your scores with us! We are sure you will surpass the developers very soon!

I picked up the beta, and I've played it for about 10 hours. I'm really confused by the people insisting this is a tower defense game. Even the survival mode feels very similar to any old RTS. It's not even like you just hole up in one spot and wait for the infected to come suicide on your defenses. You have to constantly be pushing your borders forward because you always need more space for buildings.

I tried it a few times on standard difficulty, but I decided to dial it back slightly by changing the number of days from 100 to 120. Once I did that, I was able to get to the final wave where the infected rolled over my defenses like the walls were made of toilet paper. Normally, when a horde is coming, you get a warning like "Giant horde approaching from the east," so you move all your guys over there and try to shore up the defenses in the 8 game-hours you have until they show up. The final horde comes from all directions and is so massive that it made the frame-rate go down.

I like how the infected will get more guys when they take out your buildings. Any workers or colonists in the building will become infected and join in on the fun. My first loss was caused by losing a house to a small horde. That spawned more guys and they took out a couple more houses, and so on, until I was just completely overwhelmed. Now, I keep my houses behind at least two rings of walls and defenses. Also, I keep any section of my base from being too large by building extra walls to just separate sections. The game is also a fun city-planner because you have to pack as many buildings as possible into every space, while still leaving enough room so your troops don't have to navigate a maze of buildings to move through your base.

From what I've seen, letting just infected through your defenses means certain death - even if you manage to contain it somewhat, you are severely weakened and the attacks just get stronger, so...
I'd like to play, too, but since there is no saving at the moment, I won't - I simply don't have the patience for ironman games.

Caim said:

On most parts of the internet you tell the sheep to wake up.
But on the RPG codex, the one told by the sheep to wake up is you!

How about the point not to lose hours of progress because of some mistake you made in the last 10-20 minutes by just reverting to a state before that mistake?
It's not like you can save scum your way out of everything in an RTS like in some turn based games. In RTS games, you really only save when (you think that) your position is good.
Besides, you might realize near the end that you made mistakes at the very beginning and have to restart anyway.

Of course, you could re-attempt the whole thing again and again and again until you finally do everything right in one go.
But what person with an actual life and/or desire to play more than one game in their evening has time for that?
Such a thing is excusable in games like Dark Souls where one run at a level/boss takes maybe 10-20 minutes or so. Or games like FTL where the whole game takes maybe an hour to play through. But certainly not in RTS games where each mission can seemingly take many hours.

Last edited: Nov 13, 2017

Caim said:

On most parts of the internet you tell the sheep to wake up.
But on the RPG codex, the one told by the sheep to wake up is you!

How about the point not to lose hours of progress because of some mistake you made in the last 10-20 minutes by just reverting to a state before that mistake?
It's not like you can save scum your way out of everything in an RTS like in some turn based games. In RTS games, you really only save when (you think that) your position is good.
Besides, you might realize near the end that you made mistakes at the very beginning and have to restart anyway.

Of course, you could re-attempt the whole thing again and again and again until you finally do everything right in one go.
But what person with an actual life and/or desire to play more than one game in their evening has time for that?
Such a thing is excusable in games like Dark Souls where one run at a level/boss takes maybe 10-20 minutes or so. Or games like FTL where the whole game takes maybe an hour to play through. But certainly not in RTS games where each mission can seemingly take many hours.

Click to expand...

Sure, I'm not judging your preference but the whole game seems to be basically a survival game - try to survive as many days as possible. If you don't play that ironman it kind of loses the point for me I guess.
There doesn't seem to be any "end content" or greater goal so far at least in the mode displayed in the EA

Sure, I'm not judging your preference but the whole game seems to be basically a survival game - try to survive as many days as possible. If you don't play that ironman it kind of loses the point for me I guess.
There doesn't seem to be any "end content" or greater goal so far at least in the mode displayed in the EA

Click to expand...

Ah, yeah, now I get the confusion.
From what I gather, in the beta right now there is only the one mission - but I don't think it is the endless mode, it might even be a mission specific for users of the beta to test as many systems as possible without spoilers, etc..
In an endless mode, sure, ironman makes sense. But that's not what is there atm as far as I know.

Caim said:

On most parts of the internet you tell the sheep to wake up.
But on the RPG codex, the one told by the sheep to wake up is you!

That's a huge shame. I happened upon a let's play of this last night, having completely forgotten about its existence. The let's player was appallingly bad, but the game looked like a lot of fun, as sort of RTS/TD hybrid with a lot going for it. I wanted to play it immediately. So I went to their website and all it said was Beta/Steam Oh well, something to look forward to for 2019 I guess.

That's a huge shame. I happened upon a let's play of this last night, having completely forgotten about its existence. The let's player was appallingly bad, but the game looked like a lot of fun, as sort of RTS/TD hybrid with a lot going for it. I wanted to play it immediately. So I went to their website and all it said was Beta/Steam Oh well, something to look forward to for 2019 I guess.

Click to expand...

I broke down and got the beta. At first it seems like it has a lot of potential, but after you figure out a strategy to beat the maps you realize there is very little to it (map generation is the only thing that can fuck with you then) and every map is the same thing all over again with maybe a restriction or some such added (more expensive buildings, more aggressive zombies, more open areas with less chokepoints which is actually good so you can place more defenses...).

If the planned campaign doesn't deliver then I can't imagine people playing this for more than a few days or whatever, tops. Just no reason to keep playing. It's more like a phone game right now in terms of depth and presentation etc, minus the grind.

Sure, I'm not judging your preference but the whole game seems to be basically a survival game - try to survive as many days as possible. If you don't play that ironman it kind of loses the point for me I guess.
There doesn't seem to be any "end content" or greater goal so far at least in the mode displayed in the EA

Click to expand...

Ah, yeah, now I get the confusion.
From what I gather, in the beta right now there is only the one mission - but I don't think it is the endless mode, it might even be a mission specific for users of the beta to test as many systems as possible without spoilers, etc..
In an endless mode, sure, ironman makes sense. But that's not what is there atm as far as I know.

Click to expand...

There is no endless mode planned or did they change that?
Just timed survival with a big final wave from all sides at the end, and a campaign.

There is more than one mission in the beta, 4 in total unless I missed something. You unlock them by winning the respective previous map at 100 or more percent difficulty. 130 is probably the easiest combination (more time is the important part).

I don't know if an endless mode is planned. It would make sense to have one with a game like that.

Click to expand...

At first I thought that, too, and was disappointed that there was no mention of endless... But after playing it, I'm not sure endless could really offer anything tbh. The game is just not designed right for that sort of thing yet.

Can't developers thing in perspective?! This game will be a flop from the looks of it. Just the most popular shit there is,that there is tons of games like. I am surprised that it is not also a pixel platformer.

Playing the beta, it's okay.
The start of the game is a squint simulator since the early buildings take only a couple hits to infect (but you can recover, I had a half dozen tents get infested but managed to kill all the zombies right before they took my HQ and now I'm on day 53) and the early zombies don't look all that different than your wandering villagers. Then you spend some time squinting at your walls since you don't have enough troops to fully man them and the game seems to only warn you that a zombie is chewing through them when they're low on health. Also if the map doesn't offer easy access to iron which you need to make soldiers you're probably fucked. Then you get your economy up and running and won't have to squint as much since you'll have enough dudes to cover all the entry points. Then you get to the middle of the game and it's back to squinting since now there's some annoying special zombies that you have to focus fire on so they won't wreck things, like the one with a ranged attack and the one that jumps over walls, also you have a big city now, and have fun trying to find your units when their pathfinding breaks.

I'm having fun with it but the game lacks variety; there's a grand total of six military units, a scout with a very weak attack, a soldier with a weak but fast attack that will be your bread and butter, a sniper with a strong but slow attack and a penchant to waste it by overkilling things, a flamethrower guy that can't shoot over walls but just singlehandedly saved my colonies when the horde was about to break through the outer defenses, a giant robot I haven't been able to build yet and something called a thanatos which I am not sure if I can even build in the beta. There's also two types of walls, two types of traps and three turrets And while there are special zombies most of the horde is made up of basic melee types with varying stats. I'll try to actually beat the survival map but I doubt I'll come back to it once I do, and the campaign doesn't sound all that interesting when you consider the game's mechanics.

Forgot to mention: If the game isn't gonna change all that much I'd at least like a button that shows all my units health bars, as well as less shit voice acting.
edit: the alt key does the former

Playing the beta, it's okay.
The start of the game is a squint simulator since the early buildings take only a couple hits to infect (but you can recover, I had a half dozen tents get infested but managed to kill all the zombies right before they took my HQ and now I'm on day 53) and the early zombies don't look all that different than your wandering villagers. Then you spend some time squinting at your walls since you don't have enough troops to fully man them and the game seems to only warn you that a zombie is chewing through them when they're low on health. Also if the map doesn't offer easy access to iron which you need to make soldiers you're probably fucked. Then you get your economy up and running and won't have to squint as much since you'll have enough dudes to cover all the entry points. Then you get to the middle of the game and it's back to squinting since now there's some annoying special zombies that you have to focus fire on so they won't wreck things, like the one with a ranged attack and the one that jumps over walls, also you have a big city now, and have fun trying to find your units when their pathfinding breaks.

I'm having fun with it but the game lacks variety; there's a grand total of six military units, a scout with a very weak attack, a soldier with a weak but fast attack that will be your bread and butter, a sniper with a strong but slow attack and a penchant to waste it by overkilling things, a flamethrower guy that can't shoot over walls but just singlehandedly saved my colonies when the horde was about to break through the outer defenses, a giant robot I haven't been able to build yet and something called a thanatos which I am not sure if I can even build in the beta. There's also two types of walls, two types of traps and three turrets And while there are special zombies most of the horde is made up of basic melee types with varying stats. I'll try to actually beat the survival map but I doubt I'll come back to it once I do, and the campaign doesn't sound all that interesting when you consider the game's mechanics.

Click to expand...

I'd tell you how to beat it, but that would basically spoil literally all there is to the game

I hope they're planning on expanding the gameplay and such a lot, but it doesn't really seem like it.

We would like to announce that the Early Access launch is coming soon. But first, let’s talk about the beta program and the supporting campaign.

The Beta Program Exploded! What happened?
For those that have not followed the game updates, here is a small summary.

We first announced the game in July 2017. Since then, we published updates periodically revealing more info about the game. Over time, interest and popularity grew for They Are Billions. Initially, we announced Early Access would be released in Fall 2017 with only the Survival mode. Then in Spring 2018, we’d release the campaign. But after we thought about it for awhile, we thought perhaps that the Survival mode would not be enough content to justify the Early Access launch. Therefore, we decided to delay the launch and only release it when both modes were ready in 2018.

Over time, the hype grew and we received a lot of emails from people that wanted to pre-order to back the game because they loved the art, gameplay, theme… So we thought it would be a nice idea to launch a crowdfunding campaign as we did with Lords of Xulima, which worked very well.

In Update #5, we asked the players for feedback on what we should do because we weren’t sure if we should run a Kickstarter campaign or just create a place to support us directly from our website at Numantian Games. We all agreed that the second option was the best, so we worked on setting up a page for players to back us directly. Additionally, we thought that it would be a great idea to let the backers play the Survival mode as beta testers to give us feedback to improve and polish the game. This is exactly what we did for Lords of Xulima. Everything sounded perfect

So we did it all on Halloween. We asked for a pack of beta keys from Steam and launched the supporting web. In the beginning, we temporarily restricted the Ranger Edition to avoid having too many players for the very first version of the game because of all the possible bugs. However, many fans voiced their opinion that they felt betrayed for having the Ranger edition locked. It was then that we enabled the Ranger Edition.

This is when everything really began to snowball. People started to play it, upload videos on Youtube, and spread the word. Some big Youtubers even joined the party, building even more hype and expectations for They Are Billions. In less than two weeks, the Ranger keys sold out. A few days later…the Soldier Edition, two days after that…the Sniper Edition… What?????

And during all this debacle, we, the developers were working day and night fixing all the problems and solving lots of issues with hardware compatibility. As we created a custom engine for They Are Billions, it had only been tested on a few dozen different PCs. Now we suddenly had 10K players testing it at the same time! And during the development, we also had to attend to thousands of forum posts with bugs, feedback, and thousands of emails with crash reports that the game sends automatically. We also received hundreds of emails every day of people complaining because they wanted to play the game but didn’t receive a key, or that they did not know that it was a pre-order, or that we were the most greedy company in the world for selling a game for $250 (the Lucifer Edition)… !!!

We would have loved to have the ability to save the game before the launch of the pre-order web so we could return to that point and do things differently, but the real life, as in They Are Billions, works in Ironman mode.

The Good News
First, a big thank you for all that have backed They Are Billions. We are very, very happy and appreciative. That extra income will be so helpful for creating a great campaign that They Are Billions and its players deserve. THANK YOU!!

Second, the game reception has been extremely positive from the beta players, Youtubers, and all the non-buyers that write to us just to say that they love the game and want to play it now. And this is just the Survival Mode! Wait until you see the campaign, which is the main mode that conceived They Are Billions!

Third, during these last three weeks, we have been able to polish a lot the game, solving many issues, bugs, and exploits. We now feel that it is in very good shape. But of course, we will continue the process of fixing and polishing. So, in order to allow everybody to play the game, especially the ones that have pre-ordered it, we will try to release the game on Steam Early Access as soon as possible. We expect to release it in a few weeks. We will add some additional features to the Survival Mode (as you can see in the What’s Next post on the forum). Also, we will add Achievements and Steam cards. A basic tutorial for new players will also be implemented.

Initially, the game will have only the Survival Mode during the Early Access phase. We will continue to expand and improve this mode while we work on the campaign. We expect the campaign to be ready Spring 2018.